Yin yang (taijitu)
A circle divided into a dark and a light half that curl into each other, each holding a dot of the other colour. It pictures yin and yang, the two complementary forces of Chinese thought, and in Daoism the taiji, the “great ultimate” from which they come.
Meaning
In Daoist cosmology, as Fabrizio Pregadio describes it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, yin and yang are the two complementary forces, one “positive” and the other “negative”, that bring things into being by joining and keep the cosmos running by taking turns. The circle is called the taiji tu, the diagram of the taiji, and for Daoists the taiji is the Dao seen as “the supreme principle of Unity”. The two dots are usually read as yang within yin and yin within yang. Neither half ranks above the other: Robin R. Wang, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, finds no conception of yinyang in Chinese philosophy that makes yin or yang superior. The diagram belongs to Daoism and to Chinese thought more widely, and it was scholars of the Ming dynasty who first wrote its history.
Origin and history
Yin and yang are far older than the circle. The characters appear on oracle bones used in divination at least as early as the 14th century BC, where they simply describe the weather and the movement of the sun. The Shuowen jiezi, a dictionary of about AD 100, defines yin as “a closed door, darkness and the south bank of a river and the north side of a mountain” and yang as “height, brightness and the south side of a mountain”, and the first text to put the two together, a verse in the Book of Songs, uses them for the sunny and shady sides of a hill. Chapter 42 of the Laozi says that everything “is embedded in yin and embraces yang”. The familiar circle came much later. François Louis, in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, finds it neither in the standard Ming compilation of 1415 nor in the Daoist Canon of 1444–45; its earliest known appearance is in the Liushu benyi, a study of Chinese characters by Zhao Huiqian (1351–1395), whose dated prefaces are from 1378 and 1380. No copy of that first printing survives, and the oldest editions are from 1517 and 1520.
Zhou Dunyi’s diagram of the supreme polarity
The classical taiji diagram is not the swirl. Zhou Dunyi (1017–73), one of the Northern Song masters of Neo-Confucian thought, drew the taiji as a circle split into halves of the trigrams li and kan, fire and water, wrote yang and motion on one side and yin and repose on the other, and explained the rest in a short text, the Taijitu shuo, or “Explanation of the diagram of the supreme polarity”. Louis notes that the drawing is static: it reminds the reader that yin and yang emerge from the taiji and leaves the text to say how each is the root of the other. Zhu Xi, born in 1130 and the leading Neo-Confucian of the Southern Song, commented on the diagram and took from Zhou what Kirill Thompson calls the doctrine of “the interpenetration of stillness and activity”. Zhou’s diagram, Louis writes, found doctrinal acceptance among Confucian scholars.
Where the swirl first appears
When the swirl was first drawn is not settled. Wang writes that there is no clear way to date the popular symbol or to name who made it, and gives Zhao Huiqian’s diagram as the first. Louis agrees that the Liushu benyi of the 1370s is the earliest text that illustrates it, with two complications. The book claimed that the chart it showed dated from at least the twelfth century and had passed secretly through the collections of Song and Yuan scholars, a claim Louis reads as a twelfth-century myth borrowed for a new diagram. And circles divided into two curved halves are much older as decoration. The earliest datable one Louis traced is a flaming gem between two swirling dragons on the lid of a silver reliquary made for the Tang emperor between 871 and 874 to hold a finger bone of the Buddha, and he reads its two halves as yin and yang. Designs like it, he concludes, go back to the ninth century but seem to have become widely known only by the thirteenth. The Ming scholars who first wrote the diagram’s history thought it a revelation from the remote past.
Is yin bad and yang good?
No. Wang finds no conception of yinyang in Chinese philosophy in which yin or yang is regarded as superior or can be separated from the other, and calls yinyang “emblematic of valuational equality”. Texts did give them qualities: the Yijing identifies yang with the sun and yin with the moon, and Wang notes that this way of reading yinyang writes the pattern of the world in gendered language, male as yang and female as yin, each to be cultivated.
The symbol in Daoism today
In Daoist teaching the circle stands for the taiji, and yin and yang belong to a set of cosmological emblems with the five agents and the eight trigrams, whose main use in Daoism, Pregadio writes, is “purely emblematic”: they stand for different states of yin and yang. The Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism, which teaches the Taoist tai chi of its founder, Master Moy Lin Shin, quotes him on its home page: “The Yin and Yang Tai Chi symbol contains the Universe and explains its functioning.” The institute observes the teachings of all three religions of China, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.
Sources
- Yinyang (Yin-yang), Robin R. Wang, Loyola Marymount University, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Introduction; 1. Origins of the Terms Yin and Yang; 3. Yinyang as Qi; 5. The Yinyang Symbol
- The Genesis of an Icon: The Taiji Diagram’s Early History, François Louis; Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63, no. 1 (June 2003), pp. 145–196 (JSTOR 25066694), Harvard-Yenching Institute, pp. 145, 169, 175–181, 195–196
- Religious Daoism, Fabrizio Pregadio, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 4. Dao and Cosmos
- Zhu Xi, Kirill Thompson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2. Life and intellectual development
- Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism (home page), quoting its founder, Master Moy Lin Shin, Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism
- An Introduction to Taoism, Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research